About Me

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Mel Brooks: Make a Noise (PBS "American Masters," 2013)

Charles and I watched the new documentary Mel Brooks: Make a
Noise on PBS as it premiered nationwide
(and fortunately the local affiliate KPBS actually showed it when it was
supposed to be introduced instead of relegating it to later in the schedule as
they do with so many of their shows), which did as good a job as one could in
an hour and 22 minutes of capturing what this relentless funnyman was/is all
about. There were a lot of Brooksian stories that didn’t make it into this
film, but the ones that did were predictably fascinating. Brooks himself
cooperated fully with this film — he never had for a documentary project before
— including sitting for interviews at a singularly boring-looking set, simply a
desk set up in front of a blue screen with a giant TV monitor nearby that
showed whatever was being filmed in real time, creating an odd effect not only
for Brooks’s own interview but also for those with collaborator Carl Reiner
(they did the famous 2000-Year-Old Man sketches together), Tracey Ullman and other people who were actually
being interviewed afresh for the show. (There were quite a lot of archival
scenes, too, including some with Brooks’s late wife Anne Bancroft, with whom he
finally got to make a film when
they did the remake of To Be or Not to Be in 1983.) The film does a good job tracing Brooks from his beginnings
as a New York Jew — his birth name was Melvin Kaminsky (by coincidence Danny
Kaye’s original last name was also Kaminsky) — his childhood, his beginnings at
the Jewish resorts in upstate New York, his stage fright that led him to prefer
writing for other people to
performing himself (though occasionally he has performed his own material, not only on film but
also in public as the 2000-Year-Old Man and some other bits), his early
training in the writers’ room for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows — alongside such other comedy geniuses as Reiner,
Woody Allen, Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart! — and his struggles to break into
the movie business. One project that isn’t mentioned in the film itself (but is on PBS’s Web
site, where there’s a clip of Brooks talking about it) was The Critic, a four-minute short from 1963 directed by Ernest
Pintoff and inspired by the experimental movies of Canadian filmmaker Norman
McLaren. Norman McLaren had pioneered the art of making films without a camera
by drawing directly on clear film stock, and while some of the movies he made
that way were crude animations of figures, others were abstract patterns of
lines, squiggles and dots. What Pintoff had in mind was doing a McLaren-style
abstract movie while the soundtrack would feature Brooks playing an old Jewish kvetch who had stumbled into the theatre and was grousing
about what he was seeing: “DOTS?
I paid two dollahs to see dots?”

The film also didn’t mention the story Brooks told to the Los Angeles
Times not long ago about how his first
feature film as a director, The Producers, got released: it was filmed for Avco Embassy Pictures, whose head,
Joseph Levine, was reluctant to release a movie that not only made fun of Nazis
but in its initial incarnation was actually titled Springtime for
Hitler. So Brooks sneaked a print to Peter
Sellers, who showed it in his home theatre for himself and some friends, then
loved the movie so much he took out a full-page ad in the trades announcing how
much he’d enjoyed Springtime for Hitler and how sad he was that nobody else would get to see it because of the
stupid obstinacy of Joseph Levine in refusing to release it. Levine got the
message loud and clear, and his only condition for releasing the film at long
last was that Brooks take the “H-word” out of the title and call it The
Producers. Of course there were clips from The
Producers in the documentary — not only
from the original film (including the big “Springtime for Hitler” number
itself, complete with the Busby Berkeley spoof of the chorus forming a
revolving swastika) but from the sensationally successful musical revival on
the Broadway stage in 2001, with Nathan Lane in Zero Mostel’s original role and
Matthew Broderick in Gene Wilder’s. The Producers holds up as sensationally funny, even though there’s
a part of me that almost heretically resents the way Mostel hammed it up as Max
Bialystock and wishes Brooks himself could have played the role (but then
Mostel was a major star from the Broadway version of Fiddler on the
Roof and Brooks was having enough trouble
getting the project green-lighted; had he insisted on starring in the film as
well, it probably never would have been made).

The show also noted that Brooks
originally conceived of Springtime for Hitler as a novel, until an editor said it was all dialogue
and no descriptions and therefore would work better as a play; then Broadway
producer Kermit Bloomgarden told Brooks, “It won’t work as a play; it has too
many locations. Why not try to do it as a movie?” The imdb.com trivia page on The
Producers has a number of items that seem
almost as lunatic as the film itself, like the fact that because of the
“Springtime for Hitler” number it couldn’t be shown in Germany until someone
got the bright idea of booking it as part of a festival of films by Jewish
filmmakers, and that Brooks himself had worked as a writer on two major
Broadway flops, Shinbone Alley
and All American, before making
it. The show didn’t mention that
the basic concept of The Producers
— an unscrupulous producer collects several times the budget needed for a
production, then stages a deliberately bad play that will flop so he can pocket
the extra money he raised — had been an urban legend on Broadway for decades;
Groucho Marx had wanted to film it with the Marx Brothers in the mid-1930’s
(Irving Thalberg rejected it and made A Night at the Opera instead), and the 1945 detective “B”-movie The
Falcon in Hollywood used the Producers premise seriously. That wasn’t the only dramatic film that used a
premise also employed by Mel Brooks: in 1975 former football star Fred
Williamson and Creature from the Black Lagoon director Jack Arnold made Boss Nigger, in which, as Harry and Michael Medved put it in The
Golden Turkey Awards, Williamson “rides
into a bigoted, lily-white Western town and, much to the horror of the white
inhabitants, installs himself as the straight-shooting Black sheriff. Sound
familiar? It’s the same plot as in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, but this time around it’s supposed to be taken
seriously.”

Brooks went on from The Producers to The Twelve Chairs, based on a Nikolai Gogol story in which to keep
them safe from the revolutionaries, a dispossessed Russian noblewoman in 1917
sews a small fortune in jewels into the cushion of one of 12 identical chairs,
and a group of various characters searches for them all over Russia (though the
film was actually shot in Yugoslavia). The Twelve Chairs was also an Avco Embassy release and was a dismal
flop — though former Fanfare
reviewer Royal S. Brown said it was the one time in Brooks’s work, apart from Young
Frankenstein, that he had actually shown
subtlety, pathos and wit — and Brooks was persona non grata in the film business until Warner Bros. hired him to
make a comedy Western they already had under development called Tex
X. Brooks originally begged off on the
ground that he only directed scripts he’d written himself, and then Warners
offered him $100,000 for the project and he decided that for that kind of money he could break his rule. He also
recruited Richard Pryor both to work on the script (which he did — Brooks felt
he needed him because all the other writers were Jewish and he needed a Black
person to write for the Black character) and to star (which he didn’t because
the “suits” at Warners were concerned about his already legendary drug use),
and he hired Gig Young to play the drunken gunfighter — then fired him because
Young showed up for the first scene (the famous one in which the gunfighter is
hanging upside-down in the town jail’s drunk tank and is supposed to react to
Cleavon Little’s “Are we … O.K.?” with, “I don’t know. Are we … Black?”) not on the wagon, as he’d promised, but drunk to the
gills and suffering from D.T.’s, so the line came out like gargling and Brooks
fired him and brought in Gene Wilder. Blazing Saddles was a blockbuster hit and Brooks ended up next at
Columbia, where he was going to make Young Frankenstein until the “suits” there rejected his plan to shoot
it in black-and-white, whereupon Alan Ladd, Jr., newly appointed studio head at
20th Century-Fox, took up the project and had no problem with it
being in black-and-white.

The hits just kept on coming for Brooks — Young
Frankenstein, Silent Movie (which, judging
from the clips shown in it, probably would also have been better in black-and-white à la
The Artist), the Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety (Hitchcock was still alive when it was made and
Brooks screened it for him; Hitch sat through it impassively, occasionally
giving a very restrained British-style chuckle, until he got to the spoof of
the shower murder in Psycho,
whereupon the Master told Brooks he’d made a mistake: there were 13 rings on
the shower curtain in High Anxiety,
whereas in Psycho there had been
only 10), History of the World, Part 1 — until they stopped coming. Brooks ended up at MGM making Spaceballs (a film I’ve always found screamingly funny, mainly
because there was already something so silly about the Star Wars mythos he didn’t need to do much to it to push it
into parody; in this case George Lucas’s only request to Brooks was that they not merchandise Spaceballs action figures because they’d look too much like the
Star Wars action figures; instead
Brooks inserted a scene spoofing
merchandising into Spaceballs)
and Life Stinks, then doing
critically reviled and commercially unsuccessful spoofs like Robin
Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula:
Dead and Loving It (which the Los
Angeles Times critic found especially
disappointing coming from the director of Young Frankenstein!) until he made a blazing (pardon the pun) comeback
with the enormous success of The Producers as what Brooks had wanted to write lo those many years ago: a Broadway
musical. Since then there’s been a successful musical adaptation of Young
Frankenstein and there’s still talk of one
of Blazing Saddles (whose fart
scene is shown here and regarded as the origin of all the tiresome gags about
involuntary body functions that plague so many so-called “comedies” today; it’s
tasteless, all right, but at least the fart scene in Blazing Saddles is funny,
which most of the subsequent ones haven’t been). Mel Brooks has been making me
laugh for decades now, and this is the sort of show that makes you want not
only to re-watch your favorites of his films but to check out some of the
lesser-known ones to see if they’re really as bad as their reputations!